It’s kinda like, bam, the legend of the 1970 USC-Alabama football game just keeps revealing itself again and again in the media’s red zone.

Enough, apparently, to where Sam “Bam” Cunningham can bring himself to laugh a little bit. It happens when he considers how some of life’s greatest lessons just take a little bit longer to reach the masses than one might figure.

“Naw, I never get tired of talking about that game, even all these years later,” said the 63-year-old former Trojans fullback who lives these days in Inglewood and perhaps is better known for his Rose Bowl performances a couple of years after that game. “Here’s a story that stayed dormant for some 30-something years. No one brought it up much before. Now ... ”

Now, it’s Showtime’s turn to tackle the subject of how college football helped spur integration in the South through its telling of that event in a soulful documentary, “Against The Tide,” debuting at 10 p.m. Friday.

Cunningham’s role during that hot September night at Legion Field in Birmingham, Ala., came in the first game of his College Hall of Fame career: 135 yards rushing and two TDs in the Trojans’ 42-21 victory. Although some newspaper reports said the sophomore ran for 230 yards and three touchdowns.

Adding to the mythos was Alabama coach Bear Bryant supposedly taking Cunningham into his Crimson Tide locker room, putting him up on a chair and telling his team: “This here’s what a football player looks like.” Cunningham doesn’t remember that happening. This documentary delves into the truth of that as well.

Fellow tailback Clarence Davis, a Birmingham, Ala., native, also ran for 76 yards in 13 carries and scored on a 23-yard pass from quarterback Jimmy Jones in the third quarter.

Not by coincidence, of course, the USC backfield of Cunningham, Davis and Jones was all African-Americans – three more than the entire Alabama roster had at that time.

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The foundation for the story was revealed in-depth for the first time in a 2006 book co-authored by Cunningham, John Papadakis, Mark Houska and Don Yaeger titled “Turning Of The Tide: How One Game Changed the South.”

Papadakis, a USC middle linebacker and the team’s leading tackler in that game, has also been the driving force in keeping alive a Hollywood treatment that some day will be made into a movie.

What “Turning Of The Tide” begat were more books and documentaries in the past several years, most notably the 2008 piece produced for HBO by Joe Lavine called “Breaking The Huddle: The Integration of College Football.”

Ross Greenburg, an HBO executive for 33 years who was the network’s sports president from 2000-2011, served as the executive producer of that piece five years ago with Rick Bernstein.

But after he joined Showtime last March, Greenburg decided to go back and serve as a driving force behind “Against The Tide” with George Roy and Steve Stern as key storytellers.

“We only devoted about six to seven minutes on that game (in the HBO documentary), and that just didn’t do justice to the depths of the story,” Greenburg explained. “It was much more intriguing and complex. It needed the full treatment.

“To me, it remains as fascinating a story now as it was then. But it’s really a 12-year process of how it happened for Bear Bryant, and how it finally unfolded with the help of his friend, John McKay. That’s a whole other story, too.”

Connecting some dots, Showtime’s version of the story comes at a time when media partner CBS is immersed in covering the Southeastern Conference, which stars No. 1-ranked and two-time defending national champion Alabama under Nick Saban.

Imagine today if Saban faced the same minefields of civil-rights issues and integration resistance that Bryant had decades earlier.

One of the important connect-the-dot moments Roy and Stern make in this Showtime piece is how Bryant, despite his bigger-than-life personality, still worked as an employee at the state university under Alabama governor and board of trustees president George Wallace, the standard bearer of “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

“Everyone assumed it was always Bear who ran football and the alumni and boosters couldn’t deal with integration, but there’s much more to it than that,” Greenburg said. “Credit George and Steve for crystallizing that fact, and putting two and two together.”

The Showtime doc, narrated by USC alum Tom Selleck, also includes several vital media-related moments in how the story developed.

Howell Raines, an Alabama graduate, Birmingham News reporter and eventual New York Times executive editor, is quoted about Bryant’s legacy: “He never was an outspoken segregationist. I don’t ever remember him addressing that. And that’s the thing I fault him for. In my view he was the only public figure in the state who could have taken on George Wallace with credibility. They both thought they were the biggest cats in the forest and I don’t think Coach Bryant would have been personally afraid of Wallace so much as it would be a distraction (because) if you wrestle with a pig you’re going to get muddy. So there was no upside. But he never stepped out the way he should have.”

It’s not as if Bryant hadn’t tried before.

One newspaper clip with the headline “Bryant Checks Negro Hopefuls” is shown in the piece, reporting that Bryant started the 1967 season with “five Negroes” bidding for a roster spot. None made the team. There is also light shed on a 1969 discrimination lawsuit filed against Bryant in U.S. District Court by the Afro-American Association of the University of Alabama and its president Percy Jones as the plaintiff. It was dropped when Wilbur Jackson, a black player from Ozark, Ala., received a scholarship.

Several columns written by the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray are also cited as heightening public awareness of the game’s importance. The day after the game, Murray’s column had the headline: “Hatred Shut Out as Alabama Finally Joins the Union.”

“Bigotry wasn’t suited up for a change,” he wrote. “Prejudice got cut from the squad. ... The guys in red won it. Hatred got shut out, that’s the point. Ignorance fumbled on the goal line. Stupidity never got to the line of scrimmage. The big lie got tackled in the end zone.”

And the story, thankfully, remains relevant even today.

“It would be a game impossible to play today with the persistence of the media and what they made of it,” Papadakis said. “It was a game that did not call attention to itself, done that way purposely.”

And it was not on national TV, either, so there is no footage of the contest except for coaches’ film. Those were the days when ABC ruled the college football landscape, and teams were limited to three appearances a year, including bowl games. USC was locked in with Notre Dame, UCLA and its bowl game. Alabama had its bowl game, Auburn and one other window.

Because Bryant never specifically was quoted as saying he arranged that game with McKay to achieve what it eventually did remains fodder for more discussion in this documentary as well. It wouldn’t nearly have had as much an impact had Alabama actually beat USC, now would it?

“This whole notion of Bryant losing to SC to make a statement? I’m sorry, there is no way he would want to go into a game believing he was going to lose,” says Keith Dunnavant, a Bryant biographer. “Did he know USC coming to Birmingham might have some transcendent effect? Did it have powerful symbolic overtones? Absolutely. But the story is just so much more complicated.”

Part of the complication, at least from the USC players’ perspective, was what to be expected from making this trip.

“Very few understand the mentality that existed in that time, and don’t know what messages were affecting people’s view of things,” Papadakis said.

He notes the most successful independent film of that time was “Easy Rider,” the 1969 movie starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, “really a story about Westerners going into the deep South and getting killed because they were different,” Papadakis said.

“We just had come out of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In people’s heads, especially the blacks, no one would have been surprised if someone had taken a shot at our players. It was almost expected, because of the whole perception that some type of violence will put something to rest.”

Papadakis has found a few new ironic twists looking back on it 40 years later.

In the 1971 USC media guide that he has in his possession, “it says nothing about the game’s social significance or of Sam’s heroics,” Papadakis said.

And in his “Turning of the Tide” book, he notes a photo of the 1970 USC team.

“You’ll count that we had 18 African-Americans on that team,” Papadakis said. “After that game, after Bear Bryant finally integrated his team, Alabama had one of the most successful decades in the history of college football. By the end of that 10-year period, look at an Alabama team photo. They had 18 blacks on their team.

“Isn’t that interesting?”

RECORD, PAUSE, DELETE

Gauging the media’s high- and low-level marks of the week, and what’s ahead:

GAME DAYBREAK

ESPN’s “College GameDay” marks its 10th visit to USC (6 a.m. Saturday), but for the first time, the staging won’t take place in front of the Coliseum. Ilan Ben-Hanan, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions and a USC alum, worked with university officials on short notice last week to convince them of the benefits of setting up in an area on campus called McCarthy Quad, a block west of Figueroa with the iconic Doheny Library in the background. It’s also not far from Pardee Tower, a popular residence hall for freshmen -- and where Ben-Hanan spent his first year at the school. “Attendance has been good in the past at the Coliseum, but the bar can be raised, and I’ve always wondered how cool it would be to have ‘GameDay’ on campus,” Ben-Hanan said. “The Coliseum has its charm and it’s historic, but ‘College GameDay’ lives and breathes better when it’s on the campus. We know there are all kinds of complications perhaps with homecoming activities taking place, but I’ve very thankful to the athletic administration and President (Max) Nikias to allow this to happen. We’ve pledged to them that we’ll be in and out quickly.”

GAME REPLAY

Another documentary to seek and find this weekend: CBS Sports Net has put together “Marching On: 1963 Army-Navy Remembered,” as the 50th anniversary of that game, viewed first-hand by 102,000 at Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, takes place in the context of coming just 15 days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Almost lost in that whole affair was the introduction of the first “instant replay,” by CBS Sports producer Tony Verna, who is interviewed in the piece. So is former Navy quarterback Roger Staubach, coaches Wayne Hardin of Navy and Paul Dietzel of Army, and New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whose father was a Navy assistant. Jack Ford, the CBS News legal analyst, is the executive producer of this hourlong presentation. The documentary debuted Thursday but it replays today (noon), Saturday (10:30 a.m.) and Sunday (3 p.m.) as well as four more times next week.

GAME OVER

It’s interesting to see how some have sized up this final season of HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” comparing how flawed main character/ex-MLB relief pitcher Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) as traveling a mind-numbing path similar to Walter White in “Breaking Bad.” What has resonated more with us is the social commentary in how Powers seems to have discovered false fame in a TV studio sports-talk show setting (can’t help but think of FS1’s “Fox Sports Live”), making him an even more unlikable character than when he was doing the same sort of childish, malapropos behavior during his playing days when he acted as if he was entitled to some celebrity. Can Powers redeem himself in the final episode (“Chapter 29”) that airs at 10 p.m. Sunday? Please, HBO. Don’t let us down. Or eastbound.